This was the great Louis Sullivan moment. His greatest effort. The sky- scraper as a new thing beneath the sun, an entity imperfect, but with •virtue, individuality, beauty all its own as the tall building was born. Until Louis Sullivan showed the way, tall buildings never had unity. They were built up in layers. All were fighting tallness instead of grace- fully and honestly accepting it. What unity those false masses had that now pile up toward the New York and Chicago sky is due to the master mind that first perceived the tall building as a harmonious unit—its height triumphant. The Wainwright Building prophesied and opened the way for these tall office building effects we now point to with so much pride. And to this day, the Wainwright remains the master key to the skyscraper so far as a skyscraper is a matter of architecture. Only the interior of the Chicago Auditorium, the pictorial Transporta- tion Building for what it was worth, the Getty Tomb? the Wainwright Building are necessary to show the great reach of creative activity that was Louis Sullivan's. Other buildings he did, but all more or less on these stems. Some were grafted from them. Some were grown from them. But all were relatively inferior in point of the quality which we must finally associate with the primitive strength of the thing that got itself done or born regardless and stark to the idea. The capacity for love—ardent, true, poetic—was great in him. His system of ornament in itself, alone, would prove this. His work in this was esoteric. Is it the less precious for that? Do you realize that here in his system of ornament is no body of culture evolving through centuries of time but here is a scheme and *style* of plastic expression which an individual working away in the poetry-crush- ing environment of a more cruel materialism than any seen since the days of the brutal Romans made out of himself. He in this was an individual who evoked the goddess that whole civilizations strove in vain for cen- turies to win, wooed her with this charming interior smile—all on his own in one lifetime all too brief. Regarding this achievement we may see that the time will come when every man may have that precious quality called style for his very own. Then where on earth I ask you are the others? Ah, that supreme erotic adventure of the mind that was Ms f ascinating ornament! Genius the Master had, or rather, genius had him. Genius possessed him. It revelled in Mm. And he squandered it. The effect of any genius is seldom seen in its own time. Nor can the full effects of genius ever be traced or seen. Human affairs are flowing. What we call life is plastic in everything^ it is a becoming and is so in spite of all efforts to fix it with names, all endeavours to make it static to man's will. As a pebble cast into the ocean sets up reactions lost in distance and time, so does a man's genius go on infinitely^ forever. For genius is an expres- Q 241